Interestingly, even though patients have long had full access to their medical record – laborious as it might be to obtain – just recently the Department of Health and Human Services issued a ruling stating patients could directly obtain their laboratory results from medical laboratories.
The real question – why did this take so long? Are lab results, excepting a few exceptional cases, truly dangerous? And, are patients not essentially the true owner of their medical testing? Certainly, where the patient has directly purchased diagnostics, there should be no obstacle in providing them with information. One can make a technical case that, when the results are purchased by a third-party – government or health insurance provider – those entities are the true owner of the result, but that hardly holds up to ethical scrutiny.
Regardless, this step is just one part of what is increasingly a growing movement towards transparency in medicine. I think this is a good thing – patients ought be involved at each step of testing and interpretation, and, ideally should be provided with their results in real time. It is outdated paternalism in medicine patients cannot be trusted with their own test results; is it reasonable to expect patients are a “threat” to themselves by using alternative information sources to self-educate? If this is truly so, the answer is not to hide the results – but rather to improve how we as professionals educate patients, and improve the lines of communication.
“Direct-to-Patient Laboratory Test Reporting”
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1882585 (free fulltext)